WBI Founders

Our 20 Year Record

From June 1997 until the present, the Namies have led the first and only U.S. organization dedicated to the eradication of workplace bullying that combines help for individuals via our websites & over 12,000 consultations, telephone coaching, conducting & popularizing scientific research, authoring books, producing education DVDs, leading training for professionals-unions-employers, coordinating national legislative advocacy, and providing consulting solutions for organizations.

How many education “reformers” would lay down their lives for their principles? These system “deformers,” (a phrase used by Ralph Nader who pointed out that those claiming interest in tort reform actually sought to deform and kill the legal system that enables individuals to sue hurtful corporations, as do education “reformers” who seek to destroy public schools and unionized public school teachers) include advocates from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (referring to their education initiatives, not the Foundation’s noble work in global disease eradication), Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Rahm Emanuel (who laid the seeds for the Chicago teachers’ strike), and the incendiary profit-driven Michelle Rhee. None are school teachers. They pontificate from a fly-over altitude, not in the trenches.

By contrast, in the trenches with real children were Dawn Hochsprung and Mary Sherlach, Sandy Hook administrators who charged the shooter immediately after his AR-15 assisted break-in through the secured door. They paid with their lives from their up close and personally lethal encounter.

Also dead are Rachel D’avino, a behavioral therapist, teacher Lauren Rousseau, and Anne Marie Murphy, classroom aide who cradled little Dylan Hockley in her arms as they both died.

The teacher in the 1st grade classroom was Victoria Soto. According to the New York Times, Gary MacNamara, the chief of the Fairfield Police Department said Ms. Soto had “pushed children into a closet and allowed other kids to escape” before she herself was killed.

To honor these martyrs, the next time the teacher haters, representing any group with any political slant, rev up in 2013 with proposed legislation, join us in calling them exactly what they are. WBI supports teachers.

Let’s not be turned against teachers, as a group or profession, according to anyone’s agenda.

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“The teachers and the principals were absolutely heroic. So were the others, who were in lockdown, and kept their kids calm and quiet in what had to be a traumatizing fear. I don’t think it is possible, if one was not that in that situation, to understand the depth of the heroism of teachers who put themselves in the line of fire to save children,” said Randi Weingarten, sobbing as she spoke, in a phone interview with Working in These Timeson Wednesday night. “This has kind of pulled the curtain away to show who teachers really are. Teachers’ instinct is to serve, to protect and to love. And you saw that in full view in Newtown this week. This is who teachers are. If we were in the same position, we would do the same thing; I hope that I would do so.”

Randi Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).